Forgetting and “Re membering”: The Language of Stutter and the Notion of “Home” in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Experimental Writings

Abstract

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée explores what it really means to “forget” and “Re member” historical memories, and how this process of unlearning relocates the second-generation Asian American subject in the realm of language. Cha’s act of “forgetting” and “re membering” is not as much of a psychological process, but more a physical and affective process of “becoming.” Through its stylistic and rhetorical experiments, Dictée explores how the speaker’s Korean mother tongue, which once shaped her female ancestors’ homogeneous historical and national memories, comes to enunciate alternative political values and meanings in her specific cultural context. In order to explore the intimacy between Cha’s affective language and the issue of diasporic body’s displacement, I first explore how the speaker’s act of “forgetting” and “re membering” is related to Cha’s political mission—unsettling the conventional sense of the national/historical memory and proposing alternatives in language. In the second half, I investigate how this process occurs in her speaker’s form of speech disorder such as agrammatical sentences or divergent syntax. Although Cha’s Asian American subjects cannot be understood as full, self-present and coherent subjects working against other ethnic and cultural groups, as Lisa Lowe argues, they can at least question the notion of an essentialized racial/cultural identity and elaborate the multiplicity of subject formations articulated at an intersection with various racial/gender others.